Saturday, February 9, 2008

Kansas Caucus

I just got back from the Kansas Republic Caucus. I really wanted to be a part of the Democratic Caucus, it would've been priceless to watch Hillary and Obama people go at it, but I'm a registered Republican so I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get in. If the Democrats had done it like the Republicans, I would've been allowed in but I may not have been given the "official sticker" making my ballot valid.

I want to give some observations:First of all, I felt it was my patriotic duty to vote, even though I thought about not going. But since I'm a white, land-owning (20% of my land anyway) male, I realized that over 200 years ago, men had died in the Revolutionary war so I could vote.

With that said, I'm glad the whole thing was over in 45 minutes. In a brilliant move, the organizers only allowed the representative of each candidate to speak for 10 minutes. Here's a rundown of each representative's speech.

Ron Paul - this dude was fired up! His basic message was that Dr. Paul is a true conservative and you're an idiot if you vote for McCain because of some false media notion of "electability." The guy knows Ron Paul is going down but he won't go down without a fight!

John McCain - I understand that it's very admirable, I don't mean to show disrespect, but how many times are we going to hear about McCain's POW stint? While that says a TON about his resiliency, does that alone qualify him to be President? The only other thing the guys said was Dole and Brownback support McCain (he said it like 10 times) and you'd be a fool not to.

Alan Keyes - This was great! The guy only used about 4 of his allotted 10 minutes. The basic speech was "You may never have heard of Keyes, he doesn't get any media attention but he still runs every year. He's got all the right stances and is a 'Regean Conservative' [but since I know he can't win - strongly implied] , you'd be making a good choice with these other candidates, too. I had my picture taken with Keyes in 2000, which was kind of cool. But I couldn't help but wonder as the guy was stumping, "who keeps giving money to Keye's campaign?"

Mike Huckabee - I saved the 'best' to last. I felt like I was in an old-school revival service, all the "amens" being thrown up as the two different representatives spoke. There were two kids who spoke for the Governor. The first 'kid' was 22 and you want to know his credentials for being Huckabee's representative, he's a hymn-writer, "like Charles Wesley" (I'm sure he's exactly like Charles Wesley). They took the Hymn-writer approach to play an Amazing Grace the movie angle. Mike Huckabee is both John Newton and William Wilberforce rolled into one.

The way this guy ended his speech creates both a deep hurt and deep anger down inside my being. He concluded with, "And Governor Huckabee promotes life by supporting a ban on abortion and a ban on (I kid you not - he actually said this and although my typing can't convey his intentions, it was a sincere accident) homosexuality... I mean, gay marriage. That's exactly how the gay community hears the "Christian" agenda of a marriage amendment.I was completely dumbfounded after hearing his "Freudian slip."

The second kid got up and announced his credentials to speak on behalf of Huckabee as "I was home-schooled." Which got a big applause from the crowd. He finished his speech by reading the actual hymn Amazing Grace. I really wanted to stand up and read this book to the crowd.

I wanted to go shower after hearing the Huckabee speech. I did call a pastor friend of mine who helped me work out my frustration. He said that he's currently suffering from electile dysfuntion - the inability to become aroused by any of the candidates!

And one final, funny comment. I grabbed the extra ballots in my row because I wanted to a 'keepsake.' But as I was walking to the back door, the people at the end of the row kept handing me their ballots. The bigger my stack got, the more questions I was getting asked, "where do I put the sticker, where does my ballot go..." I kept having to say "people just handed me the ballots, I'm not an official volunteer." It was both funny and annoying.

2 comments:

A good friend of mine up in Iowa wanted to go to the Republican caucus, but through some confusion went to the wrong location - the location of the Democratic caucus. It was too late to make it to the other place and, being unregistered at the time, he registered democrat and caucused there.

I guess one could debate the ethics of such a thing, but he did come back with some good stories!